There were four positives I took from tonight.
The first is obvious, and that was the performance from Ross Ohlendorf. The boss went 6 innings giving up only 1 earned run on 5 hits while striking out 6 Brewers. Ross has been hit hard often this year, so it was good to see him have a good outing like this one. While he has put together a couple of good starts this year, he has really had troubling stringing a lot of positives together, so we'll have to watch his next start closely to see if he is really turning the corner. Remember, he was one of the better pitchers in the National League in the second half of last year, so maybe he is going to turn out to be the kind of guy who just gets better as the season comes along.
The second thing I was happy with was the way the offense battled. Everyone knew the Pirates were still in the game when it was only 1-0 after 6 innings, but when Evan Meek surrendered the 2-run home run to Rickie Weeks, a lot of the fans started getting up and leaving. This Pirates team really hasn't shown the ability to battle back late in games and score when it counts most. Tonight they got some big hits late in the game, mainly from Neil Walker whose two out, two run double in the 7th answered Week's call. Walker kept his hot bat rolling with a 2/3 showing tonight, raising his season average to .320, a team high (by a lot). Once he gets enough AB's to qualify, you might be seeing his name near the top of some leaderboards.
The third positive was the base running and fundamental play. You can never take much from as small a sample as one game, but it was sure nice to see Jose Tabata keep his eye on Tony Beasley and go first to third on Delwyn Young's single in the 7th. Too often I have seen Pirates looking at the ball instead of their coaches and it constantly costs them bases. Most of the bad base running has been attributed to Lastings Milledge, but he's on my good side right now so we'll leave that alone. Young also showed some good base running scoring from first on Walker's double. He was running hard the whole time and had his eyes where they needed to be so he could scoot on home and make it a 1-run game.
The fourth positive was something pretty insignificant, but probably another one of the most exciting plays of this Pirates 2010 season. And it involved Erik Kratz of all people. In case you missed it, here's what happened:
That's one large man taking a full speed blast from an even larger man, and the good guy held on to the ball and recorded the final out of the top of the 8th, saving a run and getting the crowd on their feet.
If you pick up tomorrow's paper and look at the box score for tonight's Pirate game, you'll just see another loss, but this loss was the kind of loss that you see from the better teams in baseball. They faced a very tough pitcher that they couldn't get score any runs off of, but they were patient enough and hit well enough to get him out of the game early, they kept it close with their pitching and got some big hits late to stay competitive. The Brewers 2 insurance runs came off of the Pirates best arm in Evan Meek, which isn't going to happen very often. This is the kind of game that the Pirates are going to win more often then not if they play the way they played tonight, and that's a definite positive.